October 21, 2013

It was on this very day back in 2004 that Mark Shuttleworth took to the Ubuntu mailing list to announce the inaugural release of Ubuntu 4.10 – codenamed the ‘Warty Warthog’ due to its rough edges.

Nine years, and some nineteen releases on, the Ubuntu desktop we find ourselves sat in front of today bears little resemblance to that of its younger self. The distro went, virtually overnight, from a Debian-based curiosity – “A space tourist making a Linux distro?!” – to becoming one of the most recognisable and powerful forces in open-source software.